Cupid's Poisoned Arrow

Thanks for a great article. This is a great explanation of porn's effect on the brain. Training for the wrong target is a great way to hit home for someone who just doesn't understand. I had a friend whose boyfriend had this issue. It was really sad because she was really beautiful, so it's not like she would have been a turnoff. He got even more withdrawn since he couldn't perform well. She dumped him.

It would have been nice if they pointed out that these are EXTREME reactions to porn. I saw porn before I ever had real sex, and I've watched a lot of it, without experiencing any of the bizarre reactions described in this article.

The very first reader comment is, of course, describing all of this as "porn's effect on the brain", which is sort of like describing food addiction as "food's effect on the brain". Not everyone who eats food becomes a food addict, just like not everyone who watches porn becomes a porn addict.

After 20 years of marriage, my wife and I are still hot and heavy. I don't sneak away from her or avoid social interaction so I can watch porn.

It's like alcohol. Some people have to go "cold turkey" because they just can't handle anything but strict abstinence. Others can have a drink now and then, and not become alcoholics.

I learnt so much in this article...thankyou.

I'm not into porn, but I'm into cognition and social cognition. I work as a collaboration lead in an organisation, so I'm interested in what makes people tick both individually and within group dynamics. Which is all related to other things like self-determination (intrinsic motivation, employee engagement, bias, trust in sharing with others)

Yes of course cognition is only one aspect of our behaviours...our behaviours are also influenced by the environment (parenting, family, friends, events). Just like nutrition isn't the only thing that makes for good cognition http://bigthink.com/ideas/41955

I like how you tie it in with the PFC, which I learnt from another Psychology Today blogger, Christopher Bergland:
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/14916069492/how-does-the-dopamine-rewa...

"In a modern world we still get the same rush of dopamine when it comes to primal things like dating or salivating over a meal - but it becomes less automatic when trying to achieve goals that are not part of our primal instincts. We have evolved to have hard work, sweat and perseverance trigger the release of dopamine. Unfortunatlely, in a modern world these achievements are not viewed biologically as a matter of life or death and do not automatically release dopamine. Luckily, you can use your large prefrontal cortex and the ‘executive function’ to trigger the release of dopamine…"

I'm heavily into another blogger at Psychology today, Loretta Graziano Breuning
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/14309383783/dopamine-did-not-evolve-to...

"Happy chemicals did not evolve to surge all the time. Their job is to get your attention when something promotes your survival. They turn off soon after they turn on so they’re ready to get your attention to the next good thing.

If you haven’t learned to live with your unhappy chemicals, you might get into the habit of scrambling for another dopamine burst in any way possible. You seek the next promotion or the next party or the next donut or the next mountain or the next confrontation, depending on how your brain got wired. You create frustration, which means more unhappy chemicals and a more frantic quest to trigger happy chemicals.

This is the survival mechanism we’ve inherited. Old rewards don’t make us happy because the brain soon habituates to them. It takes what you have for granted and focuses its attention on new rewards. If you could get bigger and better rewards in every moment, you would never have to experience the core unhappiness of being a mortal human being. But that desperate seeking causes unhappiness of its own."

Loretta also says:
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/12327167516/our-mammalian-limbic-brain...

"If you surged with dopamine all the time, your energy would be depleted when you really needed it. We evolved to save dopamine for those moments when an important goal is within reach.

People do all kinds of things once they find that it stimulates their endorphins, or their dopamine, or their oxytocin, or their serotonin.

Your happy chemicals evolved to ebb and flow. But if you attend to this feeling that something is wrong, it can preoccupy you. Your cortex will scan the environment for evidence that something is, in fact, wrong. And it will find evidence to confirm that feeling

Try as you might, you can’t control your environment in a way that ensures a steady flow of happy chemicals.

Yet it’s natural to desire more happy chemicals and to do everything possible to stimulate them. They evolved to motivate us to go toward things that promote survival. Natural selection created a brain that motivates you to promote your survival with happy chemicals. A brain that was happy all the time would not need to take survival action to feel good. Survival prospects would fall. Natural selection would weed out a brain that was happy all the time!"

And this from Athena Staik at PsychCentral
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/14454446034/feel-good-hormones-may-exp...

"These feel-good hormones may explain why certain behaviors are compulsively repeated, even toxic ones that merely escalate reactivity. They help lower the intensity of painful emotions – and thus can be addictive in nature, as they offer temporary, quick fixes that release some level of the feel-good chemicals.

It is no wonder that partners say and do certain things that are counterproductive or even downright destructive. At subconscious levels, it is to make themselves feel better."

Do you agree that dopamine is not always meant to be surging?

If so, what about oxytocin...it's not as easy as oxytocin nasal spray so everyone gets along is it...don't we have to mean it, isn't being human about growth and learning

Funny thought - So what about the "somewhat" opposite of this, pre-mature ejaculation...guys that would equally get excited by porn or the real thing too quickly...from their baseline, perhaps becoming a porn addict for a little while will balance their desensitization and sensitization scale

I love how you describe the production of plastic changes in your brain as a result of overstimulation. Oftentimes, the women in pornographic features not only are enhanced by plastic, but look like plastic barbie dolls.

I wonder if there's some sort of correlation here...

The toxo parasite breeds in a cats gut and is expelled with excretion, so the way toxo gets back into the cats gut is to make rats not fearful of the smell of cats. But the weird thing is the rats still have a fear system and are still scared of the usual things like bright lights and open spaces...some how toxo lasers out this one fear pathway.

Even further surprising is the rats are actually attracted to cat urine...see here:

"Now you take Toxo-infected rats, right around the time when they start liking the smell of cat urine, you expose them to cat pheromones, and you don’t see the stress hormone release. What you see is that the fear circuit doesn’t activate normally, and instead the sexual arousal activates some. In other words, Toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. And you get males infected with Toxo and expose them to a lot of the cat pheromones, and their testes get bigger. Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to rodents, and they go and check it out. Totally amazing."
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/3842909492/free-will-or-a-parasite-con...

This reminded me of the part in this article:

"If desensitization were the whole story, erections would be weak whether the stimulus were a girl, your imagination, or porn. But obviously it's not the whole story, because porn still does the job. In fact, as you try to stop using, porn's impact temporarily increases. This is where sensitized neural pathways come in."

"Sensitization refers to hyper-reactivity/excitement—but only in response to the specific cues your brain associates with your addiction. Over time, this dual-edged mechanism has your reward circuitry buzzing at the hint of porn use, but less than enthused when presented with the real deal."

Is toxo somehow causing sensitization in rats without the rats having to grow this addiction themselves?

I don't think it's porn in itself. I have very specific visual triggers which i picked up as a kid (i can remember the incidents that created them) and those triggers give maximum stimulus. Porn without any of those triggers (99% of it) has either no effect or the opposite effect. I could in theory get a woman i was involved with to combine all three of those visual triggers at once and i know from accidental experience of this happening with one or two of my triggers being set off this way that it would have a bigger effect than porn. However i'd be too embarassed to ever mention it explicitly *and* most women would get annoyed in the end that it's not about them exactly - the more you're into them the more they'd maximize the effect of the triggers but but that's not quite the same thing.

I'm sure this is the common case. If researchers showed men different images they could figure out what each man's 2-3 specific triggers were and i think they'd find that most men who spend a lot of time watching porn spend most of it *not* watching porn i.e. they're searching for their triggers among the 99% that doesn't work for them.

The internet has magnified this behaviour because a) there's so much porn you're guaranteed to find something that works eventually and b) you have to wade through so much to find what you're looking for so it wastes a lot of time. In the past there was less of it so you were less likely to find representations of your triggers that were better than your own imagination so you didn't bother to look.

The other big lust magnifier is affection but as the visual triggers create maximum stimulus this probably leads to men climaxing more often than they would feel the need for otherwise thus reducing that effect.

So women either need to get themselves loved more or find out their husband's triggers and hope one or more are easy to induce.

yep im a female and i watched porn and i found myself addicted. then i could no longer be pleasured by softer representations of sex. however i agree with the first guy claiming that not everyone will get addicted. because i have always had a problem with being addicted to things from tv,food,internet,people i keep doing until i get absolutely sick of it. once i had to stop eating tuna for years because of constantly eating and i starting to have the same problem with chocolate.

the odd thing about porn is i get so turned on but it is so tacky and predictable so i dont get why?

I have no trouble getting an erection. My problem is keeping it when my regular partner isn't as responsive as I am. I have to wade through a sea of thoughts and feelings and emotional issues long before sex even gets started with her, and by the time she's ready I just go through the motions because I'm expected to do so. I sometimes see this as yet another barrier to sex, and sometimes I just give up rather than start. Sometimes porn is just easier than to deal with all this other "intimacy" which doesn't have to wait until we are naked to be handled as required.

What about when your SO isn't hot?

believe me, I have no problem with my SO or porn. I could jack it to Iraquis killing babies. I could screw a 95 year old woman and get off. I was simply proposing an alternative to think about.

Spanning the world, some cultures promote fidelity, while others promote open relationships. Some cultures don't even know what a relationship is. Sometimes we like pizza, other times we want a burger. Variety is the spice of life. Sometimes we are attracted to personality traits, while other times we have a desire for the purely physical. I don't have any scientific reference to back me up, but the facts speak for themselves.

Right, sometimes a person just needs a little variety. Sometimes, although the partner is attractive, they may not possess the qualities that are truly desired. Nobody can be everything to everyone, so it is unreasonable to think that 2 people can fulfill each and every desire the other has for the length of their life. Sooner or later, we all get tired of school lunch.

There isn't any difference between real and fake. The same stimuli, although real, gets old and boring: desensitization. Whether that sensation is porn, a wife, real, fake, or pudding, the fact remains that human biology dictates desensitization.
If you want to study or theorize about the addiction process, you must not think about fake as the addiction because that would be a contradiction. A person can't be addicted to something that doesn't exist. The visualization and fantasy of processing new information that is different than current experiences is the true nature of what you are labeling as "fake." Fake is not the issue, but brain activity, brain function, neurochemical response, and stimulation are the issue. When this happens, what you are calling "fake" feels more real than reality.

I understand your ideas of desensitization/sensitization perfectly well. You're saying there is a difference because in desensitization there is a lack of response to any stimuli, whereas in habituation the topic is of the same stimuli. My argument is that there is no difference. Nothing can be exactly the same every single time, so the subject/definition of your habituation is irrelevant. Even with the same partner, we can never re-live the same moment in time/space with the same circumstances/environment. Even the same act performed by the same person with seemingly the same surroundings will, in some way, be performed by an older person in different surroundings with different circumstances and history.
In regards to "real" or "fake," let me refer you to the movie "The Matrix." The brain doesn't know the difference between real and fake. Dreams feel real and can produce nocturnal emission with NO stimuli, what-so-ever.
The simple point I'm making is that with the right stimuli, be it by your definition of the desensitization model or habituation model, stimulation can be reached.
If dreams are training for the brain to react to certain circumstances, dreams are real. Reality is interpretation. If porn elicits a response in the brain, porn is real. I'm sure the responses in the brain are different when considering the activity of viewing porn and physical intimacy. Just as some people prefer brunettes, some people may prefer "real" sex, while others prefer blondes or porn.

I think many married men are attracted to porn because of the wide variety of sex acts and female body types you can search for online.

But I think that if these men who come to prefer the unlimited sexual variety of porn were not married, or whose wives were into swinging, or men who had a large amount of money, enough to be able to give a wide variety of women "gifts" for sexual favors, then they would indeed want to have sex with a variety of real live women as opposed to digital women. Most men, especially married men who crave sexual variety simply have no other choice but to use porn and masturbation in lieu of the real thing. If these men could order up different kinds of women depending on what kind of woman and what kind of sex act they prefer on a given day, like they do with porn, I'm sure they would never have the need to masturbate to porn alone.